A professional educational model to provide insight into what is going on with all aspects of secure wireless medical connectivity both across the integrated delivery network, the enterprise business model, and at the device point of care of which includes the connected medical device. The goal of this content is to provide technology information and direction to help transform healthcare in 2016 and beyond through all aspects of wireless connectivity and cybersecurity. The desired result is to improve patient care and the total clinical mobility experience across the healthcare enterprise in a secure fashion.

March 2012

March 30, 2012

SOLiD is taking names (major) in the enterprise distributed antenna systems space. I would say they are the future standard for healthcare DAS..on a lot of levels. In entering North America they are led by a seasoned team that knows this space, (been there and done that) while the experienced team has been busy establishing relationships in the right and ethical way with the carriers and integrators. They now have as stated most recently unveiled a complete offering (enterprise to the outdoor) for stadiums, sport venues and tunnel DAS solutions. They have the end to end total solution at the best CAPEX and OPEX model at the both enterprise as well as outdoor level. While 1W with sectorization will do fine; just look at this 20W solution. It saves costs and provides validated technology advancement in light of the changing marketplace.

March 19, 2012

Over the past several years the lines of demarcation have become blurred in terms of the wired and wireless network. What this simply means in my opinion is a L2/L3 switch is a switch, a controller is a controller and an AP is an AP.
I came up through the earlier stages of WiFI,as started I working for Symbol in 1999 (now Motorola). Cisco Systems, Inc. Aruba Networks, and Juniper would not be great companies in the marketplace if they did not have good gear, support, and active R&D. So then what makes one look outside of the box..at least in the healthcare vertical? The majority of healthcare IT $$ are being spent to gear up for the mobilization toward the Electronic Medical Record and "meaningful use". So this means when looking at infrastructure...it may not be status as usual..but taking a hard look at CAPEX, OPEX, and TCO...oh lest we forget IEC 80001. Juniper excels in the motto of "keep it simple stupid"..while saving a lot of costs and reducing risk. Just for instance let the intelligence behind the cape..do the job. In the review of Juniper it seems that they tackle this head on...big time. Imagine having a "virtual cloud network..one where the Master Controller is the brains in the enterprise to handle all IP addressing, firmware/software upgrades all the way down to the AP..WITHOUT disrupting real-time applications. Nirvana for the healthcare CIO. Juniper redundant controllers can be "hot swappable", without spending a lot of time and money re-configuring your network...let alone worrying about downtime. This saves a lot of OPEX costs..let alone reducing service costs..major league. Finally license costs are based on the controller not AP counts, thus reducing license cost by 1/2 versus the traditional pricing model. It seems that one market leader has an interesting marketing web site to deal with Juniper...I find this funny as all get out.

While I have written many blogs about Distributed Antenna Systems, this is one area where I do want to focus on…the right design versus cost....what does this actually mean? There has been tremendous marketing hype about some sort of design providing the ultimate solution for combining the WLAN with a DAS. (as I said in previous blogs...really again?) While some customers have gone down this path initially, it is like jumping out of a plane with a parachute…there is no going back....once you make this decision. (But in this case..you are now at 28,000 ft and you forget your oxygen). However many in the past years many have made the decision to bite the bullet and decouple the WLAN from the DAS that they have installed..the pain became too high. The reality is a coaxial distribution system was never designed to propagate 802.11 signals in an elegant fashion. Add to this the fast pace of the 802.11 standard in evolution essentially means that the coaxial infrastructure is future proofed…by “rip and replace”..certainly not cost effective when you consider the costs of the installation of a discrete WLAN architecture.
So why do I say this…let’s take closer look. As in my previous blogs, the whole concept of a DAS is to propagate cellular/PCS/ and public safety signals where diversity is not required. Signals generally extend from 700-1900MHz. Add WLAN 802.11b/g (at 2400MHz), at a signal strength of -85dBm, this is not much of a stretch to deal with the link budget. However if later you decide to add voice over IP, the signal strength has to be much stronger…around -62dBm. Still you can engineer the design…it takes a fair amount of work. However when adding 802.11a (5.0GHz), remember this came out after 802.11g, so now the entire DAS has to be entirely “re-engineered” and amplification has to be added (additional multiple points of failure). Now folks look to 802.11n and MIMO. It cannot be supported by earlier DAS/WLAN designs, and the entire coaxial infrastructure essentially is a rip/replace/re-design. With 802.11ac around the corner..well you guessed it. So one has to ask themselves…how really “future proof is this “concept” of a WLAN on a DAS and at what CAPEX/OPEX costs as well as a TCO? Whether coaxial cable used in DAS for WLAN, or Ethernet the architectures will never be able to support the bandwidth requirements of LTE or 802.11ac….only optical will. I have heard some that make the suggestion...go after the..fill in the blanks. My goal is to do the best for the healthcare industry...now and in the years ahead.

March 15, 2012

Integra Systems, Inc. has acquired WaveDeploy Expert...the ultimate WLAN site assessment and readiness tool. See the attached capabilities. It should be standard best of practice for any WLAN enabled medical device deployment.

March 10, 2012

Integra Systems, Inc. has expanded our business relationships with Future Tech Home Integration out of PA, who is a major key integrator for www.control4.com. We are working in a synergistic relationship to provide total end to end wireless integration for high end residential and commercial properties Manhattan, NYC, NY. Stay tuned for further news, but the partnership and relationship is great. It is quite ironic that Erik did major EMR integration for Siemens all over the United States, as I worked for Siemens. We live less than two miles from each other. Small world.

March 06, 2012

It is post HIMSS a week and I sure thousands of blogs have been sent and this is just another one..so will keep this short. While we had over 1,000 exhibitors one thing that impressed me was the huge focus on wireless and mobility to include the applications. What caught my eye in a graph was the importance of wireless and mobility versus EHR and meaningful use, right out of HIMSS "Top Ten Trends in Healthcare". This is additionally backed up by the image of the growth of mobility applications. Essentially while EHR Adoption and Meaningful Use had top priority at 55.5%, the Importance of Wireless and Mobile Computing was 32.3% versus 11.5% of EHR Adoption and Meaningful Use. It just confirms that fact that as a vertical, healthcare is the most mobile and thus has a plethora of medical devices, smart phones, computers on wheels and voice over IP phones that are wireless. The EHR is decoupled from the desktop to all these mobile devices, thus while the need and the insatiable need for bandwidth.

Cisco recent announcement into the Femtocell Market confirms the growth and convergence of 3G via WiFi, and that the indoor cellular space simply needs to be built out because of the capacity needs. I can pretty much make this statement, that the days of putting up "cell towers" as we know it is over.

The capacity to grow has to be brought inside...and it is no longer about WiFi. Guess what you know why a lot of folks had a lot of trouble connecting to the carriers' network while at the HIMSS? It was about capacity overwhelming either the cell site, or the BTS was not built out to capacity. One solution is Femtocells...which is fine IF you have the back haul built out.

That is where optical will rein. It is low cost, has huge capacity, and works. As you know I am big fan of SOLID...it is not just the fiber dude as they say...it about is about everything else!

In the not too distant future the days of stringing coaxial cable throughout will more than likely be over...as well as probably ethernet as we know it.